Microsoft's Anti-Google Apps Advert - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU

<comment><USER2> Hopefully Microsoft will see that ~2/3 of viewers disliked this video. It's essentially the same as a political smear campaign; all it does in the end is make Microsoft look like a petty competitor and bad sport (regardless of whether or not it's justified.)

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks like business-as-usual in Barad-dûr, but don't let the looks deceive you. It seems that Isengard grew up to be a formidable enemy - without Mordor admitting much weight to it until recently.</comment>


Automation is set to hit workers in developing countries hard - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/1316/fourth-industrial-revolution-developing-economies <comment><USER2> Societies will need to tread carefully here.

Brexit, Trump and other national retrenchment movements are looking more like canaries in the coal mine --a bracing for the waves of displaced workers looking to displace the ebbing but expensive workforces in mature industrialized countries (EU, US, Japan, SK, CA, AU, etc) for less as the need for cheap labor by mature industrialized economies evaporates due to quickly slacking demand caused by automation. [We don't need factories overseas making things to sell in Wal __*mart if we can have robots make them "in-house".]

Question 1 is how will mature economies offer their own population a way to make a living [keep their standard of living]. Question 2. is while globalization enabled billions to emerge from extreme poverty, a pause in demand for labor combined with growing populations in developing countries will result in big messes. If the first world finds it hard to provide for itself, there will be little they do for what were developing economies and even less the governments of those economies will do for their own.

We might see some economies ban automation as a way to stave off untenable unemployment in economies with little tax revenue.

Interesting times.

<comment><USER3> I haven't thought enough about this, but perhaps cheap automation could lead to self-sufficiency of nations. Apart from rare resources (which could be recycled?) * , goods could be produced where they are needed. If a state is more or less self sufficient, it can create a bubble in which its citizens are provided for even if they don't work. Or am I missing something?

* This would probably look like the UDSSR or WW-II Germany, but without the downsides caused by ideology. Workers could concentrate on improving automation ever further. The obvious downside would be that ideology would not die out, and nations would still strive to grow bigger > war.

<comment><USER4> Comparative advantage. Self-sufficiency would make us all worse off.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage)

<comment><USER5> Comparative advantage is a capitalism reasoning for Competition. It's actual logic in a post-scarcity world is dubious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having recently spent some time in India where labor is absurdly cheap I do not believe the incentive to automate exists in most places. At least... not yet. I believe automation will eventually take place at a large scale but I don't believe it will happen in the next 5-10 years in India.

<comment><USER7> The problem with that idea is that even if the human labor is absurdly cheap, that doesn't make it good. Would you want a car built by hand, or a car built by robots? The latter is going to be better built and have fewer defects. Many jobs can't even be done decently by humans (think of modern cellphone circuitry assembly).

<comment><USER8> And yet Toyota relies on people more than any other car maker and at the same time leads the reliability statistics.

<comment><USER7> Relies on people how? Citation?

Any modern car is going to have an enormous amount of robotic assembly involved. Having humans can give you more flexibility (robots take time to set up), but expose you to more quality problems because they're inconsistent. But many things just can't be done that well by humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I've just played too much Civ, but I don't understand why space colonization isn't our top priority.

It changes everything.

It won't matter if a large percentage of jobs have been automated. The ones that haven't will go up in demand with every habitable planet that is settled.

<comment><USER10> No matter how much we invest in space colonization, only a minuscule fraction of humans will ever be able to leave earth within the next ~100 years. The cost is simply too high, and technologies like reusable rockets will only bring that down marginally. Only a technology breakthrough in propulsion or materials science will change this equation, and making those areas a higher priority won't necessarily accelerate progress much.

<comment><USER11> Sort of reminds me of the Drell[1] from Mass Effect.

They nearly went extinct because their population outgrew their planet, and probably would have if they didn't make contact with the Hanar, a species that had achieved interstellar flight who took a few hundred thousand home with them before the rest died off.

[1] [http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Drell](http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Drell)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are we sure this is the case? I imagine that automation can allow humans to increase the breadth of "problems" they address in everyday life. It will certainly change the employment landscape, but we can now address new issues that are nice to have and not necessity items.

<comment><USER13> A good thought, but the problem is, the strata of society that will be affected the most by this kind of automation do not necessarily have the right skill-set to transition to these jobs that tackle these "nice to solve" problems. Think of your average truck driver - what will he do when trucks are suddenly driving themselves? Automation may not hit all of these kinds of sectors all at once, so he might find something to do in the short-term, but over time it will take over most of the jobs that don't require human ingenuity.

<comment><USER14> > what will he do when trucks are suddenly driving themselves?

As paid work becomes less available, it hopefully becomes less integral to our picture of a fulfilled adult's life (particularly a fulfilled man's life). If that happens, I hope to see a huge uptick in reproductive work: people whose jobs have been automated away using their daytime to raise their children, care for their elderly, or serve their community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess that we'll have to come up with a way of having these workers have some kind of income. Otherwise, who's going to buy all those robot made products?

<comment><USER16> "We" ? Are you in a developing country?

<comment><USER17> Earth?

<comment><USER16> It's 100% not my responsibility to somehow give people in countries I've never been to jobs.

Let's get rid of the saviour complex.

<comment><USER18> Don't worry, I don't think anyone is asking you to do anything, and I really doubt anyone would mistake you for any sort of saviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bring the robots, work sucks!

<comment><USER20> Destitution sucks worse.

<comment><USER21> Are you against automation?

<comment><USER20> In the abstract no but we currently are heading to a scenario in which inequality reaches extreme levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes, we've had this "problem" for 200 years now.

"The Luddite movement began in Nottingham and culminated in a region-wide rebellion that lasted from 1811 to 1816. Mill owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was brutally suppressed with military force."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)

<comment><USER23> "This time it's different" sounds a cliche but there's many reasons to believe this time truly is different wrt the pace and magnitude of change.

<comment><USER24> If you understand why previous bouts of automation didn't harm workers, you'll understand why the pace and magnitude of automation doesn't make a difference in whether automation is harmful or beneficial to workers.

<comment><USER23> Elaborate?

<comment><USER22> He may mean nothing more than "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you think about the amount of problems to solve there are infinite employment opportunities.

Let alone software, there is an infinite amount of ways how stuff can be better and more efficient. The same goes for engineering, as long as stuff costs more than the materials it takes to produce them. Let alone new fields like material science (graphene) or space exploration.

The demand for those jobs will grow even more to make this robot future happen.

The only thing that needs to change is education in those fields. Why can't work the rest of our population in those areas? Just use tools like capital gains tax (the value those robots produce) and direct those funds into education. If you say that's impossible, in theory a person with average intelligence can learn those things by himself with a single computer.

Tell me where the big flaw is here?

<comment><USER26> This is were most goes wrong and you fall in the same trap.

You seem to assume there are jobs which 1) AI won't be able to do and sooner or later 2) that the things that humans will be able to do for a while yet which AI wont requires specialized education.

But thats not how things work.

As I mentioned somewhere else. A cleaning lady is going to have her job longer than a radiologist. Everyone can become a cleaning lady and thus there is going to be oversupply of people who can clean.

<comment><USER27> Robots can do a better job of cleaning.

<comment><USER26> No they can't because it requires a surprising number of details to be able to do all the things a cleaning lady actually do. Getting in between the books, under the rug, up on the shelves, cleaning the toilets etc.

If a robot could do all that we would basically be close to a general purpose AI. We aren't even close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This picture from the article is nuts: [https://outline- prod.imgix.net/20170323-c86vRGKVPsbek3PZXpVw...](https://outline- prod.imgix.net/20170323-c86vRGKVPsbek3PZXpVw?auto=format&q=60&w=2000&s=7fa68cbcc86ded1ab56b65ad74700aa9)

The engineers and management have already decided. You want a job, I suggest you get into the robot design business.

<comment><USER29> Mind. Blown. This is something I would have expected to see in a few decades, but it's already the reality, I guess. Wonder how many American auto workers are out of a job due to this.

<comment><USER30> Here's one from 1984...

[https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s-- OKTGFiU...](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s-- OKTGFiUc--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/18to91b6najv6jpg.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if we could turn this around a bit by making pharmaceuticals cheaper. Not to drug the masses rather that much of modern pharmaceuticals are made by automation today, however generally one type per 'line' in the factory. What I'm wondering is if you could make a factory which could make what ever drugs you currently need, whether it is from aspirin to antibiotics to chemotherapy drugs. No spoilage from drugs being on the shelf too long, local (so fast) delivery, an excellent aid to resilience from disaster (shorter logistics nightmares).

<comment><USER32> The cost of pharmaceuticals isn't necessarily in manufacturing. If you spent ten billion dollars to get a new drug to market the cost of making the pills might very well be a rounding error.

You have to pay for that. How do you do it? You can't give away the product. And, not only do you have to recoup your ten billion investment but you need money for new product development and the certainty of supporting a constant flow of lawsuits and legal work that comes with the territory.

Making drugs in the US is incredibly expensive. Scratch that, doing almost anything in the Medical industry is incredibly expensive. Not only do you have to want to innovate and fund the R&D, you have to, from day one, get ready for lawsuits and build-up a war chest. That's a shitty position to be in.

The best thing government could do in order to reduce our medical costs is to enact sensible and fair tort reform. That, right there, would have a huge impact on the cost of medicine at all levels.

<comment><USER33> Oh those poor lords of capital, somehow found themselves wound up being in the "shitty position" of choosing to start and run a company above board. Lets just systematically remove protections for the individual to make it easier for them. I hope everyone sees right through your ideological push.

<comment><USER32> I truly don't understand your response. There is no ideology here, just math. Yeah, the it is a shitty business in that costs are ridiculous. It is in all of our interests to understand this and try to provide a better operating environment.

No, this does not mean throwing all regulations out the window and letting companies put out unsafe product.

There's a huge continuum between the scenario you envision someone like me "pushing" for and our current reality (which is getting worst every year). Somewhere in there there's a better place where drug company costs are reduced, approvals don't cost so much, frivolous lawsuits are reduced and the regulatory framework achieves a good balance between promoting R&D and serving the common good.

You are stuck on "they are all evil", which simply does not align with reality.

Here:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/how- th...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/08/11/how-the- staggering-cost-of-inventing-new-drugs-is-shaping-the-future-of- medicine/#589ec97c13c3)

[https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/30/the- cost-o...](https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/30/the-cost-of- developing-an-fda-approved-drug-is-tru.aspx)

I am astounded at how illiterate our population is about even the most basic aspects of business. We give our school system our kids for, what, 13 years or so and they come out without any real skills to hold a job, start a business or even understand finances. This is truly terrible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> i stopped reading after they used absolute numbers of robots for biggest country in this world by population, why they don't show robots per capita poor robots per total factory output or GDP, i don't like this promoting China as some country to look up to

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe people end up shunning the companies and goods made by robots. People return to a barter system.

<comment><USER36> Trend so far has been: lots of very bad but cheap products made by machines with as little use of materials as possible (we keep getting better at determining what the smallest amount is, so everything keeps getting worse!), with some variety in price and quality but all basically crap, and at the far opposite end much better but very expensive goods, often with at least some human involvement, if not wholly handmade. Economies of scale and competition don't kick in enough to reduce the prices on the top end much, and the potential middle of well-made and designed with good materials, but by machines and cutting _some_ corners, is a no-man's land where there's no profit to be had. If there's anyone serving the midrange they're selling a brand and image mostly, not providing a much better product than the low end, and just collecting more profit.

There are exceptions, but the world I see as served by capitalism is one of cheap, frustrating crap that keeps optimizing toward even worse quality, and overpriced (overpriced compared to an imagined world where the magic of market efficiency were brought to bear on it) nice things, and little in between. So much for choice.

So I don't see anyone deciding to pay 10x what the crap costs (no economies of scale kicking in or it'd be 3-4x, in a perfect world, but hey) and 1/3 what luxury goods cost for handmade mid-range. They'll bump up and have real quality plus the public image and ego-boost that goes with it, or have 10x as much crap-tier stuff instead. This is in part because people want more stuff, all other thing being equal, and in part because no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy (this is why the mid-range is a no-man's land—your market is budget conscious but discerning, educated consumers, which is to say, you're screwed). The consequence is that without regulation setting a highish floor on how awful products can be, we get the deep bathtub shaped graph of supply on the Y and Price/quality on the X, necessarily. There's no room for semi- affordable goods with a human touch. That's just how it is. :-/

Also, nitpick: per Graeber, barter is where you go _forward_ from money when money is temporarily not working, not something that you _return to_ from money, since it didn't, in any meaningful way, represent a step on the way to money.

<comment><USER37> It could be the lack of a mid-range is more of a consequence of people not having any expendable income after rent, bills, health care, child care, etc., than an essential feature of capitalism. If I had a bigger budget for personal items, I would pay $60 or more for a really nice, durable, comfortable pair of jeans, as opposed to just going to Walmart and buying the same crappy pair for $19.99 every month or so. Same goes for most things I buy, like cars, furniture, food, etc. But somehow, my rent, bills, health care costs, food costs, etc. just keep getting higher while my monthly income remains roughly constant. So I keep buying trash.

Also, the ever-rising high-end of the market gets lifted up partially by easy access to credit. If fewer people had access to credit cards, maybe those high-end products would gravitate more towards the mid-range as well.

<comment><USER38> You may be exaggerating, but if you really are buying $20 jeans every month I think you've fallen into the trap of cheap boots that Vimes described. A decent pair of jeans may cost several times more, but will last you for years.

<comment><USER7> It's weird; I buy $30 Lee jeans from Kohls these days and they easily last a year or more. Clothing is not something you have to spend a lot of money on to get something that lasts a reasonable length of time, unless you're really being penny-wise-pound-foolish by buying the very cheapest thing you can get just to save 10%, or you're extremely hard on them.

<comment><USER37> Thanks, I'll check out Kohl's next time. Honestly clothes shopping is not something I put a lot of thought into.

<comment><USER7> If you shop Kohl's make sure to use coupons. If you pay full price there for anything, you're paying too much. They always have some kind of deals, and you can usually "stack" them. So jeans for instance will frequently be something like "buy 1, get 1 half-price". Then, you can combine that with a 15% or 20% off coupon, which they run almost every weekend. You can get those on their website, or on printable-coupons.blogspot.com, and just show that cashier on your phone at checkout. So, two pairs of $48 jeans will cost you $57.60 (after 20% coupon), or $28.80 each.

Personally, I like Lee these days. They're good quality, not as expensive as Levi's, and not as crappy as the off-brand stuff, and seem to fit pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> here is an idea. we let users make robots and pay the salary to the robot creators. whoever creates a better/efficient robot will get a higher salary.

<comment> loup-vaillant Sounds like a winner-take-all situation. This isn't going to end well…

</comment></comment><comment><USER32>
      EDIT:  If you are going to down-vote this please have the courtesy of reading it
      and replying with a counter-argument based on mathematics.  I went through the
      trouble of doing the math for you and providing objective support for my claims.

Ironically it is populist policies that might push automation past the inflection point. Yes, I am talking about the $15 per hour minimum wage.

To a politician this $15 per hour battle cry is great. They have nothing whatsoever to lose. It's something they can promise and buy votes with that promise. They can even fight to get it implemented and actually have it pass. Why? Because all politicians need votes and this is an easy way to buy those votes from the masses.

But, what does this $15 per hour minimum wage do? And, please, do extrapolate past $15 per hour, because it is in the interest of politicians to keep feeding the drug, even if it kills the patient. The more miserable the masses are the better for populist politicians.

Source: No less than the entire history of every Latin American country.

A higher minimum wage is great for politicians. They keep their jobs. They might even ascend the ranks and make more money.

For workers? Bad idea. Why? Because there's a limit to COGS for a business. We are in a competitive global economy. You can't sell something for $30 when others are selling it for $15 or $20. And so, given labor cost hikes, you have very few choices on the table. Automation and offshoring are two of them.

At $15 per hour is likely to cost an employer about $18 per hour in real terms. That's $36,000 per year for someone who will work 2,000 hours per year on average (50 weeks @ 40 hours per week). If you don't understand how this works, here's a quick article by a CPA explaining the add-ons:

[http://cpainerie.com/how-much-does-your-employee-actually- co...](http://cpainerie.com/how-much-does-your-employee-actually-cost/)

It goes beyond that. A forced rise in minimum wage will hike all costs in an organization. Let's take a hypothetical. I'll use Oregon's current $9.75 minimum wage because I was just talking to a friend who lives there. Let's say you have a company with the following full time labor arrangement:

      5 warehouse employees at minimum wage ($9.75)
      10 office employees at $15 per hour
      5 managers at $25 per hour
      3 top level managers at $50 per hour

Total labor costs for the year, assuming 20% costs above basic wages (see article link provided above) would be: $1,137,000.

Now give the first tier a raise to $15 per hour. That's a 54% raise.

The second tier won't be happy. You have to give them a raise. How much? Same percentage or same dollar amount? Let's go with same dollar amount. They go from $15 per hour to $20.25.

The other groups are affected as well, so wages go up by the same dollar amount for everyone. In other words, everyone is making $5.25 more per hour.

Total annual labor cost just went up to $1,426,800, about a 25% hike. An increase of $289,800, of which only $63K was due to the minimum wage workers getting $15 per hour.

And, BTW, as you fold Obamacare insurance into this, the numbers are significantly worst.

$289,800 is real money. It's $24,100 per month. Where is that money going to come from?

What does a business do? In a real competitive environment you can't have your expenses go up by $24K per month and simply raise your prices. It doesn't work that way at all.

Oh, yes, let's not forget the other parts of the COGS equation. I won't even try to quantify this one but I'll mention it because it is important. If you source materials and services from other US-based companies and all of them see their wage costs go up by 25% you can bet some of your costs will go up.

At this point you are faced with the two options I mentioned above: Automate if possible or Offshore. I'll add: Fire a few people to the equation.

Well, guess what? All three of those options produce the same result: People lose their jobs.

Nobody is going to go to Walmart and pay 25% more for a product when the one next to it (probably sourced from China) costs less. The same with online shopping. If your product is sold on, say, Amazon or your own website and your competition doesn't have to deal with government-imposed COGS hikes, your products will not sell. People look for good pricing. They won't pay 25% or 50% more so you can keep your employees and pay them more.

That's the heartless mathematical reality of business.

In all of this politicians lose nothing. They get the masses rattled about inequality and give them the gift of a $15 per hour minimum wage. They get the votes and continue on a sweet ride in government. In the meantime, the tsunami starts to build and millions are likely to lose their jobs.

Automation is likely to be a solution for a lot of companies. If a $40K to $100K robot can replace a $15 per hour employee, work two or three shifts and not have the management complexities of a human worker. Well, guess what, it is very likely it will happen wherever that option makes sense. Another group will ship jobs to China and a small group will hike their retail pricing because they can and keep the jobs here at a higher wage level.

The cold hard truth is that automation in business is purely about the mathematics of running a business. In a free market there would always be a push-pull where people could find jobs at lower wages if they need them. By having politicians interfere with this (mostly for their own benefit, because few others will benefit) they probably have succeeded in creating the conditions to push automation through the inflection point and what's on the other side isn't going to be pink unicorns for everybody.

Once the genie is out there is no way to stuff it back into the bottle. Even scarier than that is low wage countries adopting automation as well.

If anyone objects to my conclusion they need to fire-up Excel, go through the simple math I presented and explain why it is that what I predict is wrong. Mathematically. I don't care about feelings or theories. You have to show how this would work at the most rudimentary business level without losing any jobs.

<comment><USER40> Nobody has to explain why a strawman is wrong. The simple history is, minimum wage used to have regular hikes. This stopped for decades. Now the most vulnerable among us are given a shamefully low wage for work most of us wouldn't do.

Its wrong or immoral to say America's economy rides on the premise that we must pay laborers a miserable below-poverty wage. If that were so, what an obvious truth Economists have missed all this time! All we have to do is have a sub-population we treat miserably and the rest of us can have it nice. Economics solved!

<comment><USER32> I painted a super simple business scenario. I'd like to understand how you would manage that scenario, that company, if it were your own.

Show me the math. Not the words.

Your reply sounds good but it provides zero analytical information, even at a simple level, to support anything at all.

BTW, "free market" does not mean people make "dirt" wages. It does not work that way at all. People will accept pay in the context of their reality. People in the US can't work for Chinese wages, it's simply impossible. This doomsday scenario people like to paint isn't real.

<comment><USER41> Your numbers are way off base. If Walmart retail labor costs went up 25%, their costs wouldn't go up 25%, a tiny percentage of the cost of goods at Walmart is in the cost of labor, it's part of why they've been so successful. Most people making <$15 an hour work in the service industry. If everyone is forced to bear higher costs simultaneously, it's a lot easier to raise prices and pass that cost along to the consumer.

<comment><USER32> > If Walmart retail labor costs went up 25%, their costs wouldn't go up 25%, a > tiny percentage of the cost of goods at Walmart is in the cost of labor

Oh, please! If you are going to write something like that at least pull-up a recent Walmart annual report and study it. Do some research and educate yourself before forming opinions so far out of alignment with reality.

Walmart employs over TWO MILLION people in the US alone. Labor cost is, in fact, one of Walmart's largest liabilities. There is NOT WAY they could survive a 25% labor cost hike without rising retail prices AND laying off a bunch of people because nobody is going to pay tons more for their products.

Please, do yourself a favor and learn to read a financial statement and play with it in a spreadsheet in order to understand how the real world works.

<comment><USER40> Really? Because the other retailers _don 't_ use cheap labor now? Because not everyone's labor rates will go up? If wages went up by fiat, then everybody is in the same boat.

I call it 'playing dot-to-dot'. You can string together a sketch that jumps from point to point and make any case you like. Let me try.

Minimum wage goes up - so folks have _more money to spend_ , so they buy more from retailers, so profit margins rise, so the economy booms and hiring increases. Everybody wins!

That story is 'true' too. They all are. Just, its part of a bigger story. Which is called 'economics' and isn't just some madeup cherry-picked local case folks like to trot out and say "what about _this!_ " and think they've got it all figured out.

So anyway, its immoral to freeze just the wage labor is paid, for the sole purpose of making the rest of us live better. Its simply wrong.

<comment><USER32> Please go read through the Walmart annual financial statement.

> Minimum wage goes up - so folks have more money to spend, so they buy more > from retailers, so profit margins rise, so the economy booms and hiring > increases. Everybody wins!

Fantasy.

You are missing a very important part there that should be obvious to anyone today: Competition is global, not national.

Let's take your theory up to an extreme. Let's raise minimum wage to, say, $50 an hour. Why not? Per your thinking it's simple. Everyone raises prices and all is good.

And so, you manufacture product A in the US and now have to sell it for $155 each.

I manufacture the same product. I fire everyone except for a small sales staff and take the product to China to manufacture it there. I am able to sell the same product with equal or better quality for $25.

When people have to choose between your product for $155 or mine, of equal or better quality, for $25, they will choose mine every single time over yours. Your sales plummet, you have to fire everyone and close down the company. Or you fire everyone and go to China just like I was forced to do.

At one point even importing bricks from China becomes a better financial decisions.

In other words, the scenario you painted is a fantasy.

The vast majority of products sold in the US today are NOT made in the US. We can raise our wages and prices all we want. It will only serve to create vast unemployment and further destroy us from within.

Just wait and see what will happen when $15 per hour laws ripple through the entire nation during the next few years. There are companies already leaving California because of just this.

Same recommendation as I seem to make all too often on HN: You don't understand how business works. Please do some reading and fire-up a spreadsheet and play with numbers. It isn't very complicated at a basic level.

> So anyway, its immoral to freeze just the wage labor is paid

Exactly. That's minimum wage. The free market should determine what that is. Our local and national economies will determine where the wage floor might be. In San Francisco this could be $15 per hour minimum wage due to cost of living. In other parts of the country it could be $7, $10 or $12. Government intrusion accomplishes only one thing: Job loss.

<comment><USER42> > When people have to choose between your product for $155 or mine, of equal > or better quality, for $25, they will choose mine every single time over > yours.

Not necessarily:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law_of_business_balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law_of_business_balance)

...and related with:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good)

You probably already know this, though - and I am not saying that because of these two things that your premise (or anyone else's) is wrong -or- correct.

I just wanted to inject this, as to many it may be counter-intuitive that by dropping your price (or selling at a lower price), that sometimes people won't purchase it.

I think there have been studies done where they've used the exact same product, but priced it differently, and despite the product being identical in every way, people purchased the higher-priced item more frequently.

<comment><USER32> The two links you provided are about something very different.

What's going on with our economy is that people have become very used to seeing very high quality products made in China. A stroll through Walmart, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Home Depot, Lowe's, Sears, Kohls, Petco, etc. is all that's required to ascertain this.

Nearly everything sold at those retailers is made in China. In fact, short of things like obvious US-made products like bricks and lumber products (and I even hesitate to make that statement) everything else is made outside the US, mostly in China.

And quality is excellent.

It didn't use to be that way. China was synonymous with cheap junk. Sure, there's still cheap junk coming out of China but I think it is safe to say that most of what you can buy at the top retailers in the country is of fairly decent quality.

And so, when faced with a price difference between a high priced US-made good and a lower priced Chinese product the effects you linked to don't really apply. In fact, in some cases the Chinese product is of equal or better quality when objectively compared to the US-made product.

Here we have a case where paying a low price does, in fact, deliver a good-to- excellent quality product.

Luxury goods are a different story. They don't necessarily obey the laws of physics.

We have a problem. A really big problem. I wish I was smart enough to know what the solution might be. I don't. I know bits and pieces of it. Yet it is way too complicated. There is one thing I do know, Trump's idea of "bringing jobs back" sounds great but it is easy to see, given our discussion, that this is just-about impossible.

Can we start manufacturing excellent iPhones if we build fully automated factories? Nope. Not a chance.

Why?

Because China has reached a point where labor cost advantages are not the only advantages they enjoy. I don't have the time to get into the details so I'll be brief. Manufacturing businesses depend on efficient supply pipelines in order to produce product at the lowest possible cost. Chinese industrial cities are setup such that the supply pipelines are very short and efficient. Everything is an hour or less from the OEM. There are towns that make microwave ovens and all of the sub-contractors for the microwave oven makers surround them. Same with other product categories.

This advantage is huge and it is one we do not have. We don't make semiconductors or motors or almost anything here any more. You'd have to take the desert in Nevada and build a huge manufacturing town consisting of fully automated factories producing every component needed to make an iPhone in order to reach the point where we MIGHT be able to make iPhone on par with China.

That's what I call a "gulp" moment. When you realize just how terrible our position might be in a globally competitive marketplace.

As I said before, an artificially high forced minimum wage only exists completely disconnected from the context and the realities of what's going on in the real world. And this, precisely, is the reason it is so destructive. Companies don't need to pay lower wages because they are greedy. They need to reduce their costs because they are getting killed right and left by China, and high government-imposed minimum wages only means one thing: Our government is helping China force these companies out of business one by one. This is not what we should be doing.

The argument for protection of the poor sound interesting until you realize that the more businesses we kill off and the more jobs we export the reality of high minimum wages is that the very people the idea seeks to help will be the first to end-up on the street by the millions.

This is a math problem. And politics and politicians are fucking it all up because they do not suffer direct consequences and their lives are secure. I mean, look at the Obama's. They are getting paid SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS to write a couple of books. Their lives are completely decoupled from the policies they have forced upon us. They are set for life while everyone else will have to suffer. And that's the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> _"...The question is, assuming that this trend toward the networked automation of factories continues — and there is little evidence to suggest that it won't — what happens next?..."_

This is getting rather tiresome.

Let's see. My guess is that "Things that can't be created by automation" become more scarce, hence more rare. That means their price goes up, demand increases, and more folks start making that stuff.

Why do rich people buy expensive designer cars? After all, once the model T came out, the problem of people wanting to go from one place to the other was solved.

<comment><USER4> That is a very glib answer. The economic effects of automation are a very serious issue. A wage economy based on veblen goods is not a good outcome for the vast majority of people.

The invention of photography vastly reduced the demand for painters, first by allowing a photographer to produce vast numbers of portraits quickly and cheaply, then by allowing consumers to make their own photographs. People still make paintings for money, but there is a power-law distribution of the rewards - the vast majority are amateurs or barely scrape a living, while a tiny handful of artists sell paintings for tens of millions of dollars.

There is a growing economic consensus that automation will lead to substantial polarization of the labour market. The jobs most threatened by automation are the skilled but routine jobs that characterise most of the middle class. Some of the displaced factory workers, truck drivers and clerical workers might find a good career as an artisanal baker or a professional YouTuber; I suspect that many more will end up falling into poorly paid and precarious work at the bottom of the labour market, or dropping out of the labour market entirely.

Ultimately, we're talking about people's lives and livelihoods. It's simply not good enough to assume that everything will be OK, to hand-wave away serious doubts being raised by sensible and informed people. There is a strong possibility that the wave of populism spreading across the western world is being stoked by increasing economic insecurity resulting from automation. We on HN are the people responsible for automation; it is incumbent on us to seriously examine the risks posed by it. If we are not prepared for these risks, the results could be catastrophic.

<comment><USER44> There's a fair argument that what the industrialised world has _now_ is a wage economy based on Veblen goods. Though to what extent I'd have to think.

<comment><USER43> I think to get a general idea of how much this might be true, consider taking a person who was just barely surviving in society two thousand years ago. Show them the modern world. Ask them how much of it is Veblen.

We don't see it because we're immersed in it. To that guy, everything we do is gold-plated and incredibly decadent. We are far, far beyond creating and exchanging things simply for survival.

The richest people don't even create or exchange things of any substance. A guy plays basketball, makes ten million a year. Somebody writes a best-selling book, never has to work again for life. These things would have made no sense to the overwhelming majority of people just 150 years ago.

<comment><USER44> You could almost certainly go back only 200 - 300 years.

Hell, in France of the 1950s, the majority of homes outside Paris didn't have indoor plumbing.

(Consider, as a corrolary, that a major cause of building failure is moisture- induced rot: if you want to risk-mitigate your construction and reduce a major source of failure, you'll consolidate plumbing either _outside_ the structure, or to a subsection of it which is particularly immune to rot.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I want to become an evangelist, how do I go about it? - <AUTHOR> So to give you a little insight into myself. I am a recent graduate BS Application Development student. Even before I graduated, I was signed away to a great company. I applied to become an Android Developer, because while studying it was a field I showed intrest in. During my internship I fell in love with web technology. My company was just starting a web-unit, since it was primarily focused on app-development in the past (mainly iOS). I was grateful to be in a position where I could make the shift to something I felt more passionate about. When I graduated I started taking on way too many commitments simultaneously. Trying to stick my hand in as many cookie-jars as possible trying to make money as fast as possible. I want to accomplish and so little time. I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably won't. Eventually I dropped everything. After which I asked myself one important question: Where do I want to be in 5 years? I am a good developer, I am valued at my work as a developer. However I know I'll never be a great developer, not to be harsh on myself. But I do the google code-jams and what-not and 15 year olds can beat me straight. I have no great mind. I'm smart and tech-savvy and I learn quick, but I am no genius. Before becoming a developer I was a field-marketeer for 2 years selling electronics in stores as a way to make money while studying. My last year I got hired by Microsoft to exclusively sell their products and be a one-stop knowledge base in stores. I loved it, people came to me and I knew how to help them. Seeing that light go on in someones eyes when they understood something was beautiful. Given 90% of the time the clients were tech-handicap, but still. I want to pursue something on the developer-scale that combines both. I know it takes years of experience to become an evangelist. My question is: How do you start? What do you do? Maybe there are evangelists out there that can give me some tips. <comment><USER3> "I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably won't. "

I'm not sure what you want to achieve but in general the real world is not that strict. You are stuffing your ambitions into a tiny box and for no good reason. I would advice you figure out where you want to be in the next 20 years. This will give you a far larger scope for your thoughts.

Old people are not junk, if they keep their mental and physical faculties.

<comment><USER4> Name me one person older than 24 who's achieved great things. You can't, can you?

/s

EDIT: Someone replied with an interesting link but deleted the comment: [http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life- crisis/](http://fundersandfounders.com/too-late-to-start-life-crisis/)

<comment><USER5> What a junk comment. Get yourself a culture. This is the kind of BS people say when they mistake marketing with reality. Scratching the surface of western propaganda will teach you that beyond the "Mark Zuckerberg" effect there is an army of bright professionals who have revolutionized their field or industry with hard work, uncommon skills and (most of all) a consistent attitude OVER THE YEARS. At 24, in most cases, you are barely mature enough to actually START having the kind of consistency required to make great things.

<comment><USER6> The "/s" means he's being sarcastic...

<comment><USER4> I tried to use sarcasm to point out how absurd the original statement was. I thought putting the "/s" was making it too obvious. Sometimes it backfires though. Oh well, c'est la vie.

<comment><USER6> Text is a very dangerous format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been a tech evangelist. It's an interesting and stressful job. If you can cope with lots of (international) travel, repeating the same speech over and over and over, subsisting on pizza and cheap beer, and listening to over- confident neophytes explaining why their plan to beat Facebook is rock solid - it may be the job for you!

As with any role, the best way to demonstrate your worth is to develop a portfolio. Give talks at every meetup you can. Make sure they're video'd - watch them back and learn from your mistakes.

Get a name for yourself on StackOverflow (or whatever) as someone who can clearly and concisely explain a solution.

Write dozens of blog posts - and get them syndicated - showing how you can write tutorials, answer questions, and explain moderately difficult concepts to a lay audience.

Learn how to organise events. Start your own meetups / hackdays / whatever. Organising venues, catering, invites, sponsors, speakers, schwag etc is absolutely invaluable experience. Join the organising committee of your local events.

Finally, find a company (preferably with some funding) who you can see _needs_ to get their message out there. Write up your plan on how you would help them succeed. Which meetups are they best to sponsor? Which merchandise has the best response among developers? What parts of their proposition need the most explaining. Pitch your experience.

A word of warning. I quit the evangelist game because I couldn't cope with frequent international travel. It's fun at first - but can play havoc with your personal relationships.

<comment><USER8> Could you order those (talks, Stackoverflow, blog posts, etc) in order of importance? I'm in a similar spot as OP; looking to become an evangelist. I've actually taken my first job internationally, and wouldn't mind the travel at all.

<comment><USER7> It depends. I'd put talks as 1st - especially if you can get people tweeting "OMG! Brilliant insight from @tylerpachal - I totally get COBOL now!"

Building up a reputation takes time - and it will depend on the company. A big organisation probably won't care about SO for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Given 90% of the time the clients were tech-handicap, but still._

Referring to people who aren't knowledgeable about a subject as 'tech- handicap' rules you out as a potential evangelist in my opinion. You need to be an expert, you need to be passionate about a product, but _most of all_ you need to be a nice person who doesn't look down on people who know less than you.

<comment><USER10> Even the nicest people can be brutally honest it doesn't mean he was mean to the people. You yourself are assuming he is not based on 1 brutally honest opinion. No one is perfect and even the nicest people can generalize it's nothing to be ashamed of and definitely does not rule him out

<comment><USER9> The generalisation isn't the problem. It's entirely possible that 90% of the people he dealt with were complete beginners. The problem is referring to those people as "tech-handicap". That isn't 'brutally honest'; it's being mean.

A good product evangelist is someone who can talk about the people they've met in the same way regardless of whether or not those people are still in the room. _That_ is the skill that makes you good at evangelising something - <USER2> people like you they'll listen to you. If people see you being nasty they won't, because they'll wonder if you're going to be nasty about them once they leave.

<comment><USER10> You make a valid point that the term he used is harsh and mean. But don't assume he is a bad person, you can't say he isn't evangelist material based on 1 wrong term he used.

If we're gonna hold words against people, well obama isn't president material, because you remember that one time he said the N-word. No president should use racial slurs. You see what I'm getting at.

<comment><USER9> He used it in a post on a major tech forum, specifically asking for advice about becoming an evangelist. It's not like Obama merely saying the N-word, it's like Obama saying the N-word in a speech about the proliferation of hate speech against the black community in America.

<comment><USER10> Well if we can't make mistakes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably > won't.

Two years is not long enough to become regarded as an expert at anything. You are potentially shutting yourself off from much with this attitude. I think many people have this fear of "never going to be as good as the others", but here's the thing -- many people think it, very few admit it, which makes it seem disproportionately scarier.

Stick with it. Learn from the 15 year olds until you beat them straight.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess you are right, but the thing is. It's not about becoming an expert. You have these geniuses doing things that blow my mind. And horrible coders that hit it big with things like snapchat, which grow to the point you hire other people to rewrite and maintain it.

<comment><USER12> Don't worry if you aren't as good as the guys who started at 15. I started at 8 and there are guys who are doing stuff that is blowing my mind. There is _always_ someone smarter than you (unless you're Knuth).

Focus on what you want to do - not what others are doing. Be the best at what you are good at not what others are good at. Becoming an evangelist means that you will need to focus on your communication skills - getting the job might come down to quite a bit of social networking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your insight. I will definitely work on my communication and social networking skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Firstly, good communication is very important to being an evangelist. So you should edit your post into separate paragraphs to make it easier to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did lol, HN doesn't allow texts above 2000 characters I had 3500 and skimmed it down and had to remove paragraphs.

<comment><USER14> What you wrote hardly says anything about evangelism and why you'd want to do it. It's mostly about previous experiences, which are hardly related. "I'm a developer with experience in sales and customer support. I like both the technical side and the human contact and would like to combine them," would've sufficed.

<comment><USER10> He probably felt like sharing, paints a good picture as to why he wants to do it tho

<comment><USER14> To be honest, after reading that, I don't have a clue why he wants to be an evangelist, or whether he has any clue what it actually means. That description could perfectly describe the reason to become a product manager, or a support lead.

IMHO it should've been an elevator pitch, describing which parts of being an evangelist sound interesting to him. Communication is a key part of being an evangelist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Trisha Gee (Evangelist at JetBrains) wrote a recent piece about her experiences:

[http://trishagee.github.io/post/becoming_an_evangelist/](http://trishagee.github.io/post/becoming_an_evangelist/)

</comment><comment><USER14> There's a couple of things that could help you towards evangelism:

\- Read, a lot. Also form an opinion about what you read.

\- Blog. Write about the stuff you think about. Voice your opinion and make sure you write some original stuff, don't write the same stuff all tech blogs are writing.

\- Network, both on- and offline. Get to know people who are doing what you want to do and figure out how they got where you want to be. Stay in touch afterwards.

\- Take a philosophy course. It'll help you to start thinking outside of the box.

</comment><comment><USER16> > But I do the google code-jams and what-not and 15 year olds can beat me > straight.

There's this guy who won the Abel prize in 2012 called Endre Szemeredi. He said that throughout his career he always felt himself slow compared to the other guys around him. He started to do maths at 22 as his parents wanted him to go to medical school - that he left and went do do manual labour in some factory. His professor though he'll never be able to become a proper mathematician.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone who made it big before 25 just got extremely lucky. That doesn't mean that they're not smart though.

You shouldn't give yourself such a short timeline for achieving your career goals - The odds are severely against you. Capitalism isn't optimised for fairness; it's optimised for making as many people work for as long and as hard as possible (and this effect is only going to get worse with time).

Financial success is actually an oddity - A flaw in the system. It goes against what it's optimised to do.

Think of capitalism like the carrot dangling in front of the horse to keep the horse moving.

If you've learned to enjoy watching the carrot dangling and wiggling around aimlessly at the end of that stick, then you're getting the most value out of the system.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's what worked for me. You could say I was an evangelist of sorts. I did not set out to be an evangelist, more to educate myself about devops, and [https://sysadmincasts.com](https://sysadmincasts.com) was the result. Ended up getting hired by one of the companies I created a video on (but not in an evangelist role).

Here's some things to think about:

      - you do not need to be an expert
      - you can teach yourself to be an evangelist (probably the best way)
      - 22 is *young* (I have 10 years on you)
      - almost better if you know nothing as you learn from the ground up
      - you will learn everything you need to know along the way
      - possible to brute force your way into it via consistent hard work

Here's my suggested strategy:

Start a blog or youtube channel where you review products around an eco- system. Boom, you now run your own evangelist company, congratulations! Keep at this consistently for a few years. Focus your reviews on a specific type of company or series of product lines. You will get on people's radar. This will bring in job offers as you have proved yourself as an evangelist. A few things that I can think of off the top of my head re: the journey.

      - pick an emerging tech eco-system (I chose devops)
      - something shiny and new (devops)
      - educate yourself about said eco-system
      - educate others about what you learned (brain dumps)
      - chunk these into small 1-2k word postings (blog or video)
      - was doing a weekly text/video release (hope to get back on a schedule)
      - it will be extremely painful in the beginning as you will suck (I did)
      - you will quickly become better and improve your craft
      - have a release cycle to keep you motivated with an end in sight
      - set clear goals for what each posting will be about
      - show examples (code, workflow, diagrams, etc)
      - weekly cycle will force you to keep things small and workable
      - just takes time and effort to research
      - it's easy to write simple brain dumps about what you learned
      - this could take years (it did in my case)
      - don't write crap postings or spam content
      - we are sick of corporate marketing/hype/vapor crap
      - an unpolished human-to-human conversation works very well!
      - show example use-cases (who, how, what, why, when, etc)
      - think unboxing video for tech products (what does the gui look like)
      - people will recognize you provide value
      - this will open doors beyond your wildest expectations
      - you will gradually become an expert
      - very rewarding to help people from around the world
      - can take over your life if you let it
      - force yourself to keep quality up over all else (don't be lazy)
      - you can do this alongside your day job
      - builds proof that you can be an evangelist
      - you will become much better at distilling concepts
      - this provides extreme value for time crunched people
      - you taught yourself how to learn & keep current!

The trick is to keep yourself motivated. If you look at many information products today (podcasts, youtube channels, magazines), most of them follow a model like this, just copy it. Just the reward of helping others alone makes this worth it, so you really cannot go wrong! In that, even if you do not become a full-time evangelist, you have educated yourself, educated others, built a public profile, and that will pay off big time when looking for work in the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> What is "evangelist"? I see this term often, but don't really understand it.

<comment><USER8> I think it is better known as "Developer Evangelist" or "Developer Relations".

<comment><USER19> Yes. But what exactly does it mean? I thought maybe it is "very qualified developer" but I read comments here, and doubts grow, maybe I understood it wrong.

<comment><USER6> It's just someone who sells a concept or technology to companies, really. Knowing how it works is a plus, but it's not like there haven't been very prominent tech evangelists who knew next to nothing about tech. If you can explain what people gain from using the tech in a good enough way you're pretty much done.

<comment><USER19> Yes. This reminds me of the Alan Perlis: "Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> you can idol another well-known evangelist of your choice, for example Richard Stallman. ; >

</comment><comment><USER21> Can you grin like an idiot and sound super-excited about high tech dog shit?</comment>


Crossing the US in an open-air, two-seat aeroplane - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/bespoke/story/20150424-a-view-that-puts-window-seats-to-shame/index.html <comment><USER2> Awesome! How did he manage to overcome dizzying feelings from cross-winds in an open-air cockpit? When I fly a sailplane, beside tailspins and free-falls (controlled of course) it's the crosswinds that can make me feel dizzy, especially when I approach a runway with an angle over 40 degrees left or right to the runway direction to compensate for cross-wind. And there is also the open-air pressure "fun" with quickly changing cockpit winds, especially over large water bodies and mountains.

<comment><USER3> I suspect the queasy feeling you feel on approach is from (intentionally and necessarily) uncoordinated flight, not from the airflow across the cockpit.

In normal flight, you fly coordinated; the airplane is flying "straight and level" through the airmass; the total force vector on the pilot and the inner ear is straight down the spine and everything feels normal.

To address a crosswind taking you off course, you simply turn ("crab") into the wind, but the airplane stays coordinated and you sum the aircraft airspeed vector with the airmass vector and adjust until your ground track is taking you where you want to go, even though the nose of the airplane isn't pointing straight along the ground track. This still feels "normal" though it can look odd in a strong wind and at low altitude.

In a crosswind landing, you can't allow the nose to be off the ground track[1]. Otherwise, you'll impose a large sideload on the landing gear. So, you transition to uncoordinated (slipping) flight, where you dip a wing into the crosswind to keep the ground track aligned with the desired track. At the same time, you use opposite rudder to align the nose with the ground track (which is aligned with the runway on approach).

In this condition, the force vector on the pilot is not straight down. (The turn coordinator "ball" will be displaced into the crosswind; that ball operates purely on force, so the pilot [and pax] feel the force vector pulling them to one side, but they know they aren't moving with respect to the airplane and this confusion is very disconcerting to some.)

Long way to explain: in a long cross-country flight, the airplane is coordinated for 99.9+% of the flight and so most of the source of "dizziness" from crosswinds is no factor.

[1]-many transport aircraft have gear that is tolerant of crabbed landings. Almost no light aircraft do. There's a limit to how much slip a large engined transport aircraft with underwing engines can tolerate before the engine nacelle will scrape the ground, so designers of those airplanes have had to allow for crabbed touchdowns in strong crosswinds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the airframe: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockwood_Aircam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockwood_Aircam)

Much bigger and more expensive than I expected for an ultralight (450kg empty and 100k).

<comment><USER5> It's a twin engine airplane (you need a multi-engine rating on a regular pilot's license to fly it). Not really an ultralight, despite appearances. The engines alone are half the cost.

<comment><USER6> Heh, in a typical light general aviation twin, the engines alone are >half the value (replacement cost).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an even more basic and adventurous way of cross country flying, using only a paraglider and camping gear: [https://vimeo.com/104930744](https://vimeo.com/104930744)

More info here: [http://sierraparagliding.com/first-complete-crossing-of- cali...](http://sierraparagliding.com/first-complete-crossing-of-californias- high-sierra/)

<comment><USER8> I have been meaning to get into powered paragliding. It looks like it offers the same kind of views at a much more leisurely pace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article: Some of the farms boasted a single oil derrick, pumping out a few barrels a day. "Not enough to live on," Webster observed, "but a good extra income."

I don't know about you... but I could probably live on a few barrels a day. A barrel is $60 bucks today. Around 5 barrels a day, everyday, is a 100k annual income.

<comment><USER10> Costs...

<comment><USER11> Are surprisingly low for a well-engineered setup. You can run many pump jacks off a single-cylinder engine (a dozen or more in some arrangements). If you have two jacks that counterbalance each other, your only loss is friction. You can even run the engine on the natural gas that comes out too (which would normally just be flared off).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a long time. One of my favourite authors did this back in '91.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9eFFz3gZbA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9eFFz3gZbA)

He wrote a book about it.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Cannibal-Queen-Stephen- Coonts/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Cannibal-Queen-Stephen- Coonts/dp/0671038494)

</comment><comment><USER13> Insanely cool. Would love to do this one day.

How expensive is it to park your airplane for the night?

<comment><USER14> At many regional airports, it's either free for small planes or very cheap. For example, my airport of Charlottesville, VA charges nothing for planes under 7,000 lb ("LNDG FEE ONLY FOR ACFT OVER 7000 LBS."):

[http://airnav.com/airport/CHO](http://airnav.com/airport/CHO)

<comment><USER3> pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations? Is there a technical reason for it or is it just a convention among pilots?

It's a [frustrating] convention among pilot data services. METARs, TAFs, FDs, etc are all coded. Many of these systems date back 30+ years, when telecom equipment and data transmission was much more limited and expensive.

After a short while, it's relatively transparent to decode the abbreviated weather and other items that we use a lot. And of course, anyone who is remotely fluent in English can decode the minimal abbreviations in the quoted text.

It's also somewhat easier to scan certain reports (TAFs and Winds Aloft forecasts) as the abbreviations tend to keep the data in a visually scannable almost tabular form, so you can easily see when conditions are becoming more/less favorable.

If it were free/cheap to update all the systems that generate and all the systems that process, interpret, archive, and/or retransmit that data, there's no reason to keep the abbreviation culture. It's far from free, so inertia will keep it the way it is for a long time.

PS: I don't know why that comment is dead. It seems a perfectly reasonable question and your account isn't banned...

<comment><USER15> Probably for the same reason Digital Video is filled with acronyms. Medical notes also have the same pattern.

Basically, specialized fields have their own vocabulary that evolved super fast relative to the evolution of the English language. It would be very cumbersome to use the full terms when trying to communicate.

At any rate, the original hyperlink to the world wide web page for this article has beautiful joint photographic expert group pictures—or perhaps were they portable network graphics, I didn't check the hyperterxt markup language to verify. And the cascading style sheet layout is quite clever to present these pictures. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are only 600k private pilots in the US? Dang, that's a small group of people I'm thinking I should join. Growing up flying with my dad, off-and-on, I had no idea the numbers were so small.

<comment><USER17> It's only about 40-60 hours of time + $10K in costs to get your private pilots license.

<comment><USER18> Depends where you're learning. I'm looking more at 10-15k for 40-60hrs. Then again, 172 G1000 planes so...

<comment><USER17> Newer planes will cost more per hour, but glass is definitely the way to go. Shop around, each shop is going to offer different pricing based on what their costs are, and the aircraft time is the most expensive component (followed by fuel, then instructor time).

Disclaimer: I hold a private ticket, and 10 years later still haven't found time to get my instrument or multi-engine. Life happens!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently did a round-the-state Colorado road trip and can highly recommend it to anybody interested in a huge variety of gobsmacking beautiful scenery. From ancient cliff-fortress ruins in the SouthWest of the state to Rocky Mountain National Park in the North.

Great Sand Dunes National Park (shown here in the pictures) is an absolutely amazing place to go. Totally out of the way, but so worth the drive and the amazing hike across the dunes.

The experience can be a bit magnified if you come from a coastal area, the air on some of the peaks (like Pike's Peak) is so thin that, until you acclimate, walking more than a little bit results in a queer dizzy feeling that makes the whole experience even more fun.

Come prepared though, a pretty large part of the state is so low in population density it's hard to even get mobile phone service. So plan your routes carefully, bring maps and have an independent GPS device that doesn't require data service for route planning.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wondering if it's his camera or the compression that ruined what must have been stunning photo opportunities.

That said, this looks like it was incredible fun. I just wish the pictures had come out.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is there a library for this style of webpage, or is everyone reinventing the wheel for this stuff? Love the design and feel of reading stories this way.

<comment><USER22> The bottom references it being created using [http://shorthand.com](http://shorthand.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Amazing

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it normal nowadays to not make a desktop version of a page/section?</comment>


You know what Zuckerberg did during recession? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pluggd.in/mark-zuckerberg-wore-a-tie-during-recession-297/

<comment><AUTHOR> Its true commitment of Zuckerberg and an example of leadership .What I learned from Zuckerberg :- Few days ago,I reached to an Indian VC for seedfund,I told him Sir I have two apps with business plan and demo then I have shown both apps, He told me you apps are good but I really scared to invest on app, I was surprised!, I asked "Whats your concern sir", He told me , If you have two apps, then might be after few months you'd have 2 more apps. He gave me this example of Zuckerberg, build and follow one path till your app won't die. And its up to you what you decide.

</comment><comment><USER2> Shows Zuck's commitment towards the company. Trait of a true leader.

</comment><comment><USER3> Appearance is everything.</comment>


Big (and non-computable) Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html

<comment><USER2> This is surprisingly approachable. It's fun (and flattering, I suppose) to see computability explained in a broader context.

It makes me wonder: what is the lambda-calculus equivalent of the busy beaver? Number of normal-order steps before normalization (for a given program size)? Are the LCBB numbers different for different evaluation orders? What metric do you use for program size: depth? Number of lambdas?</comment>


When will there be cheap permanent mass storages for archiving? - <AUTHOR> As people are producing more and more data every day (pictures, videos in better and better quality), there must be a high demand for very large permanent storages. In my impression, the only way for mass storage is to buy expensive HDDs. While in the 90ies there were CDs, that could serve the market, there does not seem to be an equivalent to please today's demands. There seems to be development in optical disk storages, but with at most 500GB (experimental) they are far below actual needs. Already 20 years ago the company Creo produced optical tapes that were able to store 1TB of data. What happened? What are the (technical and maybe commercial?) problems in building cheap mass storages for commercial use? <comment><USER2> First of all, permanent is a hard challenge, and CDs (as you mentioned) generally was good somewhere between 1 and 10 years, not more. I know the danish national library spends quite some time transferring archives from CD to a newer CD.

I think backup tapes are still the best bet (as long as they are LTO-based). Built for longetivity (some/most have stated lifespans of 30 years on a shelf, YMMV) and an open format (i.e. three completely separate business building drives that can read each others tapes).

The LTO tapedrives also do in-flight test of the writes (at full speed), so that an failed write will never be unnoticed.

Actually they have a write head, then a read head then another write head and another read-head.

When you write to the tape, writehead1 writes it and readhead1 checks it. If it fails, it retries with writehead2/readhead2 .. If that fails too, the backup is aborted and the tape is marked (in tapemedia-internal memory) as bad.

The bummer for a private person is that even though the tapes themselves are relatively cheap (around 200USD for a 6 TB tape, that can take up to 15TB depending on compression rate of your content) the drives are expensive as heck (due to a lot of smarts), think 5k USD range.

Another benefit is that if a drive goes bad, it can be exchanged without the datamedia being exchanged as well (the same is true for CD/DVDs but not for harddrives or SSDs).

But as always, if you don't have three copies (on different media/sites/...) of your data, you actually don't have any copies at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the mid 90ies there were 9GB hard drives availabe, which is roughly the same amount of data that fits on 14 CDs. Today we have 14TB sized HDDs, so an equivalent optical disk should be able to store 1TB of data. However today a private person easily has more than one device plus several external HDDs to store his or her data. So I guess it would not be too greedy to demand permanent media with a capacity of 10TB. Comparing with CDs the price could be 2USD. So in this comparison I honestly find a 6TB tape for 200USD incredibly expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> C_void's question is ill formed. What do you mean by "cheap" and "permanent"? What constitutes "mass storage"? "[A]chiving" suggests durability over time, but how much time? What sort of access time would be acceptable?

The lede paragraph provides some context but is not explicit. What is the application contemplated?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right in that I was little explicit. Let us talk about a private persons need and let us stay at the comparison with CDs as they were available in the 90ies. In another reply I derived today's needed disk size as 1-10TB. Let us also say that the access time should suffice to be able to watch a 4k resolved movie. You say archiving suggests durability and CDs may not have the same durability as tape storages. However I would say that a cheap price would compensate a possible lack of durability, because one could easily duplicate or restore important data.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Usefulness of CSS Framework agnostic html tags transpiler? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering how useful it would be to create a HTML tag transpiler to create a CSS framework agnostic HTML files.
So instead of writing code like this for say, a Panel
Boostrap:
   <div class="panel panel-default">
     <div class="panel-heading">Title</div>
     <div class="panel-body">A Basic Panel</div>
   </div>
Bulma:
   <nav class="panel">
     <p class="panel-heading">Title</p>
     <div class="panel-block">A Basic Panel</div>
   </div>
We can just write code like this

   <panel>
     <panel-heading>Title</panel-heading>
     <panel-body>Body</panel-body>
   </panel>
 So now the transpiler can automatically create HTML files in the dist directory (via Webpack)?
This way you can switch CSS frameworks and you also don't need to learn classes, etc for each framework? Just an idea.. wondering what the pros and cons are? <comment><USER2> I've been using variations of HTML traspilers for a couple of years now. First versions were in PHP with native DOMDocument parser; more recently implemented in Node.js.

The core engine is really small. There's a registry of custom tags, and it walks the parsed tree of tags, runs callbacks, building the final HTML string. The rest of the functionality depends on registered tags.

A tag can render HTML, CSS classes, styles (combined in head), generate JS (combined at end of document), fetch stuff from database.. In your submission history, I found the following gem. If this is possible, then I think your idea of a framework-agnostic style system based on HTML tags is not too crazy. ;)

      <database name="bookstore" defaultIdMethod="native">

          <column name="id" type="integer" primaryKey="true" autoIncrement="true" />
          <column name="title" type="varchar" required="true" primaryString="true" />
          <column name="isbn" required="true" type="varchar" size="24" phpName="ISBN" />
          <column name="author_id" type="integer" />
          <foreign-key foreignTable="author" onDelete="setnull" onUpdate="cascade">
            <reference local="author_id" foreign="id" />
          </foreign-key>

          <column name="id" type="integer" primaryKey="true" autoIncrement="true" />
          <column name="first_name" type="varchar" />
          <column name="last_name" type="varchar" />

      </database>

(From: [https://cameronspear.com/blog/a-different-and-better- approac...](https://cameronspear.com/blog/a-different-and-better-approach-to- database-migrations-in-php/))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I would be willing to try writing a webpack plugin to do the same for Html files om a weekend then :) although I'd only do it as proof of concept for now.

It's crazy that something like this doesn't already exists.. Seems like such a simple idea that can save a ton of headache for all devs.

<comment><USER2> Yes..I think it's a deep topic, the history of XML/HTML-like "languages" and its variants. That includes template syntaxes in Angular, Vue, React, and also Bootstrap/Bulma and other CSS frameworks with "atomic" classes like margin, padding.. Whole application frameworks can be based on this concept.

Here's a small and smart parser for HTML <-> JSON that I've been using: [https://github.com/andrejewski/himalaya](https://github.com/andrejewski/himalaya)</comment></comment></comment>


A New Kind of Classroom: No Grades, No Failing, No Hurry - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/nyregion/mastery-based-learning-no-grades.html <comment><AUTHOR> I think this is generally the correct direction for education to take. The dissenting voices mentioned made some good comments though. But I think each of those concerns can be addressed through proper program design. Learners should practice skills they have already learned, and they should be re- assessed on those skills periodically. Some topics, especially in the humanities, will require classroom discussions to really master. And if it saves money, all the better- as long as it works :)

However, I will echo the common sentiment that college readiness for 100% of students is neither achievable, nor a desirable goal.</comment>


Anybody at Nokia speak Spanish? "Lumia" = "hooker" - <AUTHOR> http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/dictionary/es-en/lumia.php

<comment><USER2> EDIT: It looks that some dictionaries on the internet use Lumia and Lumias as the equivalent in Spanish for prostituta. I can guarantee (being Spaniard born and raised and having spoken in Spanish with people from literally any spanish-speaking country) that people use Lumi or Lumis in very, very rare occasions. Lumia is even weirder (I just learnt it to be honest) and I dont really understand why the dictionary only includes Lumia. (rae.es). Honestly I think that that word will be removed from the dictionary sooner than later.

I am sorry to say this but the entry is wrong :( Lumi = hooker. Lumia doesn't mean anything in Spanish. Actually most of the spanish speakers I met don't even know that Lumi = hooker (I have one cousin called Lumi and no one noticed until she was in her early 20s...)

Anyway it probably means something funny in other languages :p

<comment><USER3> I am Spaniard too and agree with what you say. If you search on a dictionary, lumia is indeed a word for 'Prostitute', but in some places of spain is used as an affectionate word.

In fact, my granddaddy used to call my small sister 'Lumia', which in north of Spain could be used as a familiar substitute for 'Rascal'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Randy = hooker in Hindi, that will not make Randy Ortan change his name :D

From a land of gazillion languages (India), I can tell ya, this is inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, "Siri" means "butt" in Japanese as you must all know now, and I know for a fact that Apple has many Japanese engineers in its HQ. That alone won't stop a clueless brand name from going public.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well to be fair, Nokia did whore itself out some.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've said this here before: Kuga (Ford's SUV) in Slovenian means bubonic plague. And it seems that does not stop people buying them here :) And I, for one, would gladly say "let me check with my hooker if I'm free tomorrow" :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Well... Suzuki did change the name of their "Suzuki Wanker" (Suzuki Pajero) in Spain. It depends...

<comment><USER2> No they didnt. I have seen many Mitsubishi Pajero in Spain and its so funny haha

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> El Chevy no va.</comment>


Android Marketing: Using coupons to give away paid Android Apps - <AUTHOR> http://zemariamm.posterous.com/using-coupons-to-giveaway-paid-android-apps <comment><USER2> This looks like a neat idea. A nice extension would be to allow for a QR code entry that would invalidate itself over some criteria.

</comment><comment><USER3> Using the free version + paid unlocker approach ([http://www.marvinlabs.com/2011/01/sharing-code-full-lite- ver...](http://www.marvinlabs.com/2011/01/sharing-code-full-lite-versions- application/)), you can gift the paid version by sending just the unlocker APK to the user. Since all the functionality is in the free version from the market, they'll get updates normally. That said, this is really cool - I was thinking of building something like it for my applications.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was actually just wondering the other day if this existed for either (Google or Amazon) Android market.

This seems like a good solution until they implement it into the market itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> I didn't dive deep into the source code.

Does it invalidate a coupon after it's used?

What would happen if I get a new phone? Would I need to get a new coupon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently you can't control the number of times a coupon has been used, but you can control its lifetime. If you get a new phone (and the coupon it's still valid) it will work, otherwise it won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We are working on a SaaS that solves exactly this problem combined with some additional things except you don t have to enter any coupons, its completely managed by the back end.

Looks cool though.

<comment><USER7> one of my interests is startups that are in the mobile SaaS space..do you feel comfortable giving out the firm's name?

<comment><USER8> If you're into that sort of thing take a look at how I handle SaaS billing in my GeeTasksLite iPhone app. Try to cheat your way around, too. :) If you need to get in touch with me, just contact GeeTasks support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like a cool idea. Thumbs up!

</comment><comment><USER10> Could the same thing be done for iPhone apps or would Apple not allow such things?

<comment><USER8> The Apple's Appstore has coupons for free installation (up to 50 coupons per release).

I have also designed my own billing system, which has server-backed "free trial", time-limited purchases, and of course "we want to thank you this much" free orders. You can see it in action in my GeeTasksLite iPhone app. I'm thinking about selling this billing system as a library and a service (the server side).</comment></comment>


Deep AutoEncoders for Collaborative Filtering - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NVIDIA/DeepRecommender <comment><USER2> According to the nextflix prize leaderborad at [http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard.html](http://www.netflixprize.com/leaderboard.html), this result wouldn't even be in the top 1000. More than that, due to the absence of compositional structure in the data I wouldn't expect this approach to work well. Would love to hear more insights, I'm digging into the paper now.

All that said, open code for running this on arbitrary data is great to have! A thanks to Oleksii Kuchaiev.

<comment><USER3> You're comparing ensemble performance with single model performance. The test set RMSE the authors are able to achieve with their model is pretty impressive to me considering it is a single model that doesn't even exploit the time dimension.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Colors for Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-colors/

<comment><AUTHOR> My first Firefox Addon. It is a port of the original from chrome, which I like very much, but couldn't use anymore: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- colors...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- colors/adailobllebnhioglgkmaioilhlkdden) (since chrome fails on my system I had to return to FF).

I like it especially in combination with my hacker news userstyle: [http://userstyles.org/styles/71445/better-hacker-news- design](http://userstyles.org/styles/71445/better-hacker-news-design). But I tried to make sure none of my changes break anything in the original design.

Hope someone likes it, and I appreciate feedback.

<comment><USER2> Can you also fix the hn comments? Longer threads are pretty hard to follow; they "spiral" down from the highest comment.

edit: It would be nice to be able to fold the comments, like code.

Great thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean that it is hard to see which comments are on root level? I guess you mean the userstyle?

 _edit_ : Ah, ok. I don't really want to add unrelated functionality. But there is another extension for that: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-suite)</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Director of Eng. of Unix Tech Jordan Hubbard's Talk at USENIX 08 (PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa08/tech/hubbard_talk.pdf

<comment><USER2> Great summary of features in Leopard. He went into more detail on sandboxing stuff than most other presentations I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems like the last bullet point on a lot of the slides is truncated</comment>


Modern Hieroglyphs: Binary Logic Behind the Universal "Power Symbol" - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/article/modern-hieroglyphics-binary-logic-behind-universal-power-symbol/ <comment><USER2> I had to stop and ask myself how I learned that the power symbol means power. I can only guess that at first it was the symbol on the button that was largest. So size has meaning. Over time, I memorized the symbol. So now, the buttons can all be the same size.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. In modern devices people most likely learn intuitively from other factors such as the total absence of other buttons, central or uppermost placement, or from the light shining from behind it when switched on. We have been encountering the formal industrial / product design disciplines a little at [http://8-food.com/](http://8-food.com/) recently and I for one am having quite an enjoyable time similarly dissecting things! :)</comment></comment>


How Do We Tax Cloud Computing? - <AUTHOR> https://interconnected.blog/how-do-we-tax-cloud-computing/ <comment><USER2> Read the first paragraph and was done. Nothing is different from a hypothetical article in 1970 "How do we tax mainframes"?</comment>


Tesla Beats In Q4 With Adjusted Revenues Of $761M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/tesla-beats-in-q4-with-adjusted-revenues-of-761m-expects-35000-car-deliveries-this-year/ <comment><USER2> Is "Tesla beats in Q4" a common financial reporting phrase? Google gave me five results for "in after hours trading following its general beat" and they were all for this article. Most of the results for "beats in Qx" were stories by Alex Wilhelm or blog spammy results.

<comment><USER3> Yes. It's short for "Tesla's earnings beat expectations in Q4"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The last time I valued Tesla, it needed to have CAGR revenue growth of over 70% in the next 5 years with margins of comparable high end car manufacturers (about 15%) to get a fair value of around $75.

I hope you get off the train before this cycle comes to an end.

<comment><USER5> I got both of my rear cheeks handed to me on earnings today. (I was long a fair number of puts on TSLA.)

I believe in the company's technology, and the Model S is quite nice (a colleague has one), but the stock is WAY, WAY ahead of itself here.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." rings quite true for me today.

<comment><USER6> They just had a run-up from 130 to an all-time high of over 200, they released early that they would be exceeding expectations.. and you had a put out for earnings?

Irrationality exists in many shades, I guess.

<comment><USER5> It takes two sides to make a market...

<comment><USER6> Well yes, and the other side are all those people that keep themselves up-to- date on their stuff. If your information base is summed up as "a colleague has that car, but they recently had fires, so surely they are not worth X", why are you doing options?

(I have a theory of course: TSLA shorts stock supply is scarce enough to carry a very significant premium. So you enter options, where it's easier to find that "other side".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love the company, but I sold all of my stock a few weeks ago for a nice profit. I'm sure the true value will get there someday, but I'm no gambler.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note that it was only a beat on "Adjusted Revenues". Top-line revenue was actually a miss (615M versus 680M estimates).

That being said, I Think the future is rosy for Tesla but TSLA is strained

<comment><USER9> 680MM estimate was non-GAAP, Tesla's actually non-GAAP revenue was $761MM

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Down 5% during the day, up 12% after hours.

<comment><USER11> good fucking lord

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone explain what's up with this GAAP/non-GAAP business? I am aware of GAAP, but i thought it was something you either followed or were naughty and didn't follow, not that you could simultaneously follow and not follow.

<comment><USER13> Basically it just says that following one set of guidelines (the GAAP) their numbers are this, but following another set of guidelines (their own preferred accounting guidelines) their numbers are higher. It's kind of like the difference between listing your cumulative GPA and major GPA. The numbers are the same, it's just the ones you choose to include that are different.

<comment><USER10> >It's kind of like the difference between listing your cumulative GPA and major GPA.

Except that you get to choose which classes are in your "major."</comment></comment></comment>


ESnips: A Story of Hearthache - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/05/esnips-a-story-of-hearthache-for-its-founders-investors-employees/

<comment><USER2> Disintigrating personal friendships have killed more startups than divorce has. The divorces are just more memorable.</comment>


Productivity Variations Among Software Developers and Teams - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.construx.com/blogs/stevemcc/archive/2008/03/27/productivity-variations-among-software-developers-and-teams-the-origin-of-quot-10x-quot.aspx <comment><USER2> "Excel's team produced about 13,000 lines of code per staff year. Lotus's team produced 1,500 lines of code per staff year."

Maybe this is one of the reason Microsoft beat the crap out of Lotus, starting from a position where Lotus had 90% marketshare and they had none.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't come to that conclusion for several reasons:

1\. Lines of code is an almost meaningless measure. 1,500 lines of code can be (and often is) much better than 13,000 Lines of code.

2\. Microsoft (by default) had a huge head start over Lotus in Windows apps (They wrote the OS, for crying out loud.)

3\. Microsoft (by default) had a huge head start over Lotus because of their marriage to the hardware manufacturers and their borderline illegal business practices "If you put Lotus on that box, we won't give you your discount on Windows". (I have no idea if this exact arrangement was ever made, but you get the idea.)

If Excel and Lotus were both being developed today as web apps, the story could very easily be different. At least the playing field would be more level.

<comment><USER2> Lines of code is like democracy - a terrible system, but less terrible than the other ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Jimmy John's Makes Low-Wage Workers Sign Noncompete Agreements - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/13/jimmy-johns-non-compete_n_5978180.html?1413230622

<comment><USER2> Does this happen in Williston, ND? The oil boom in that area has spurred so much growth that even entry-level workers at Wal-Mart are paid $17.40 an hour, or 2.5X the minimum wage. How many of those workers have signed noncompete agreements? I don't know for sure, but given the competition for labor there, I doubt that many have.

If this is a problem, it's just a reflection of market conditions (including high unemployment). Williston shows that the cure is growth. A rising tide lifts all boats.</comment>


Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates - <AUTHOR> http://www.torchbox.com/blog/2012/10/are-content-management-systems-dead

<comment><USER3> I cannot stand authors that do this: "OK, OK, the CMS is not dead, I'm just being provocative." Instant trust lost.

<comment><USER4> Classic example of Betteridge's law of headlines[1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines>

<comment><USER4> For the fellows currently downrating this comment, the title was _Are content management systems dead?_ , and has just been edited to _Web agencies should do more than just hand over a set of templates_ a few minutes ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been pondering this for awhile now, as one of my clients makes 99%-static websites for their marketing campaigns. They currently use Drupal as their CMS, but I see that as overkill, as most of the site is static and the layout shouldn't be changed by anyone with publishing rights. However, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to break through the "$CMS can do it all, easier, faster, and cheaper" thinking that has been sold to executives.

In my client's case, the only "content" that changes are blog posts, media (screens/videos) and, possible, promos on the front page. Everything else stays the same, 24/7/365. There is little reason spend money on using a CMS that can do everything, when a simple HTML/CSS/JS and a clean web framework (Django/Rails/Symfony) will do.

What I've attempted to explain to higher-ups is that website development should be built on progressive enhancement, because it is easy to start with something bare and add the features (models, callouts to external services) fairly easily and with little code. The flip side is that if you start with a kitchen-sink approach (a la Drupal/Joomla) you will need to take away features because the administrators will have too much power to change the site, increasing risk that something bad will happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thing is, most companies, especially those with small budgets, don't give a shit about crazy UX, they just want a fairly attractive site that they can manage the pages and copy on. Then there are bigger companies with huge, expansive libraries of content who really do need a system to manage it all.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the author is mistaking Content Management Systems with something else. Content Management is about content management. I don't quite get his point.

 _I'm concerned that enabling a writer/journalist/marketing executive to control every aspect of their website_ Well, IMO you can't refer to "controlling every aspect" by "content management". If you don't want people to modify the design, use a CMS.

 _The only part of the Google Ventures homepage that needs to be content managed is the Here's what we've been up to section._ Exactly ! Content Management is for people to manage content.

<comment><USER7> his point is that for static content, the workflow should be [someone generates content] -> [layout person designs a layout optimised for that content]. with a cms, what you get is [someone designs a generic layout] -> [content person stuffs content into it]. fine for, e.g., a "latest news" blog, not so much for page-shaped stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's something I realised a little while ago:

The web _is_ my content management system.

I post to Flickr, Dribbble, Blogger, Github, Google+, Twitter etc and that stuff is my content. I post it there so that other people will find it and interact with it.

After that realisation, I figured why fight it and decided that the strategy for my personal site was to collect all my content from those other places.

<comment><USER9> But don't you wish you had a tool to keep track of what you've posted where, streamline broadcast-posting, and manage conversations?

That's a market I'm surprised not to see twitter-client-makers invade - <USER2> management systems. They've been making ones for Twitter, why not also a Github client? And a Quora client? Have conversations with the same people across a variety of services and sites? Let a social management system coordinate the conversation.

Imagine conversation view looking like:

      Back-and-forth emails on top, followed by
      A few tweets with images linked, then a
      Github pull request,
      2 FB messages (with other FB friends too),
      Another pull request,
      A Facetime chat, and finally
      Some closing emails.

It reminds me of Wave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hah, try working at an agency, Building that landing page and having all the parts editable by non-techy users is absolutely required & no real challenge, It just takes a "homepage content item" type system with specific fields for things like "hero image copy" or "content area 1 image/copy/icon"

<comment><USER11> In my experience, the "it just takes" path of development will lead to a user experience that breaks down fairly quickly in many content management systems.

The overall layout of a page becomes hidden behind layers of indirection in the CMS (e.g. you edit the hero here, and then go there to select it for the homepage, but the content for blocks on the next row of the homepage are maintained somewhere else entirely).

As an agency, it's not that strange to offer 'marketing services' which includes doing the content and layout for key pages of the client's website (like author's example of the iPhone 5 section on apple.com). It can be more cost effective to have a front-end developer update these pages if and when they change, compared to developing a complex CMS to handle constantly evolving page layouts.

<comment><USER10> All good points, CMS ux can get fiddly, front end editing can help, but that's a rabbit hole i'm not keen on,

I think I've managed to keep things reasonably straightforward (e.g. for these oddball pages all the fields are on a single page in the admin, with a nicely segmented form), but as ever there is a lot of room for improvement, and I do concede a time for doing things by hand occasionally :)</comment></comment></comment>